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About theAIRnet

The Academic-Industry Research Network – theAIRnet – is a private, 501(c)(3) not-for-profit research organization devoted to the proposition that a sound understanding of the dynamics of industrial development requires collaboration between academic scholars and industry experts. We engage in up-to-date, in-depth, and incisive research and commentary on issues related to industrial innovation and economic development. Our goal is to understand the ways in which, through innovation, businesses and governments can contribute to equitable and stable economic growth – or what we call “sustainable prosperity”. (read more)

As a research organization, theAIRnet prides itself on its systematic scholarly research, while recognizing that it is impossible for academics to possess the deep knowledge of the operation of companies and industries that can only come from years, and usually decades, of practical experience. In theAIRnet, industrial practitioners appreciate the research tools with which academics work and their willingness to integrate theory and reality, while academic scholars appreciate the profound, and irreplaceable, knowledge of practitioners and their willingness to ask questions about the economy and society that transcend the immediate operational concerns of their own companies and industries. The funding for our research comes from public and private agencies that seek contributions to knowledge about how and under what conditions the operation of the economy can result in stable and equitable growth – and what can be done to reform its operation when it does not. We are particularly interested in understanding the relation between “the productive economy” and “the financial economy”, and how the former can make use of, rather than be abused by, the latter. In principle, we make the findings of our research freely available in the forms of working papers and reports, although most of our research ultimately ends up in scholarly journals and commercially published books. We also seek to disseminate our research findings to a wider informed public through the news media and a variety of public events.

THE PROBLEM Corporate profitability is not translating into economic prosperity in the United States. Instead of investing profits in innovation and productive capabilities, U.S. executives are spending them on gigantic stock repurchases.

THE RESEARCH These buybacks may increase stock prices in the short term, but in the long term they undermine income equality, job stability, and growth. The buybacks mostly serve the interests of executives, much of whose compensation is in the form of stock.

THE SOLUTION Corporations should be banned from repurchasing their shares on the open market. Executives’ excessive stock-based pay should be reined in. Workers and taxpayers should be represented on corporate boards. And Congress should reform the tax system so that it rewards value creation, not value extraction.

Events

On July 30-31, Professor Masahiro Kotosaka of Ritsumeikan University and Professor William Lazonick of University of Massachusetts held the Japan Conference on Financial Institutions for Innovation and Development at the Osaka Ibaraki campus of Ritsumeikan University.

The conference was funded by the Ford Foundation and the Graduate School of Business Administration, Ritsumeikan University. Details on the conference, as well as previously conferences on Financial Institutions for Innovation and Development, can be found at www.fiid.org.

On February 16-17, 2015, theAIRnet was involved in a workshop on Strategies for Innovation and Development (STRIDE) that seeks, ultimately, to create a transnational Master’s curriculum that trains professionals in government, business, and civil society in theoretical frameworks, research methods, and policy approaches for achieving stable and equitable economic growth.

On August 11-13, 2014, Bill Lazonick, president of theAIRnet, and two AIR associates, Kaidong Feng of Peking University and Yin Li of Georgia Institute of Technology, visited Huawei Technologies in Shenzhen, China, to learn about how, in just over 25 years, the company grew to become a world leader in communication equipment and China’s foremost example of a global high-tech competitor.

Their study of Huawei is part of a project on innovation and competition in the global communication technology that is a major focus of theAIRnet’s research efforts.